Whats it Like to Die?
By P.H. Atwater (c)
Any pain to be suffered comes first. Instinctively you fight to live. That is automatic.
It is inconceivable to the conscious mind that any other reality could possibly exist beside the earth-world of matter bounded by time and space. We are used to it. We have been trained since birth to live and thrive in it. We know ourselves to be ourselves by the external stimuli we receive. Life tells us who we are and we accept its telling. That, too, is automatic and to be expected.
Your body goes limp. Your heart stops. No more air flows in or out. You lose sight, feeling and movement - although the ability to hear goes last. Identity ceases. The "you" that you once were becomes only a memory.
There is no pain at the moment of death. Only peaceful silence ... calm ... quiet. But you still exist. It is easy not to breathe. In fact, it is easier, more comfortable, and infinitely more natural not to breathe than to breathe.
The biggest surprise for most people in dying is to realize that dying does not end life. Whether darkness or light comes next, or some kind of event, be it positive, negative, or somewhere in between, expected or unexpected, the biggest surprise of all is to realize you are still you. You can still think, you can still remember, you can still see, hear, move, reason, wonder, feel, question, and tell jokes - if you wish.
You are still alive, very much alive. Actually, you're more alive after death than at any time since you were last born. Only the way of all this is different; different because you no longer wear a dense body to filter and amplify the various sensations you had once regarded as the only valid indicators of what constitutes life. You had always been taught one has to wear a body to live.
If you expect to die when you die you will be disappointed.
The only thing dying does is help you release, slough off, and discard the "jacket" you once wore (more commonly referred to as a body). When you die you lose your body. That's all there is to it. Nothing else is lost.
You are not your body. It is just something you wear for a while, because living in the earthplane is infinitely more meaningful and more involved if you are encased in its trappings and subject to its rules.